Thor

A classic comic book maneuver is to place a character on the cover of low selling title to get non-fans and completists to pick it up. “Guest Starring Wolverine”, “Featuring an appearance by Gambit!” moved plenty of units and tended to amount to a mere single page or panel where Wolverine would nod to Ghost Rider or The New Warriors and say, “Not bad. Maybe next time I’ll help you out.” And you’d be stuck with an issue of The New Warriors that you didn’t want to begin with but hey, Wolverine, love that guy. Thor is the film version of one of those comics I never cared enough about to read month to month, padded out with small nods and cheeky asides to assure the audience that Thor plays an important part in the Marvel movie universe and one day we’ll get a movie that proves this point. So in between off hand references to Tony Stark and an appearance from Hawkeye where he doesn’t even shoot a fucking arrow(I know!) you get a Thor movie, which is everything you expect and a little less. Thor is a nice guy but a little cocky on account of being a prince with a magic hammer. Thor is such a nice guy that he ends up a tad boring. Oh sure he is plenty arrogant in the first twenty minutes of the movie but not in any off-putting way. Should I be surprised that the character of Thor has all the tarnish and grit of a new shoe fresh out of the box? No, I shouldn’t.

The script is a mess of cliches we have all sat through a million times before. Yet, these are good performances. Idris Elba just stands there and holds a sword for most of the movie and the dude straight kills it. I believed he’d been guarding a rainbow bridge his whole life. However you start to question his abilities after he makes the point that nobody gets past him and the rest of the movie has anyone and everyone getting past him.

Does it irritate anyone else that when we are shown a world of gods and impossible wonders that it only amounts to waterfalls and people who can fly but otherwise it is the same as anywhere else? Hell, we have waterfalls on earth too! You ain’t so impressive, Asgard.

Other things I had time to think about while watching Thor:

Hiring practices for women are still draconian in Asgard. Thor appears progressive by having a woman, Sif, on his team of warriors but later holds his decision to hire her over her head in order to get her to go along with his foolish plan. Not cool, T.

Tom Hiddleston is a good actor but his portrayal of Loki is too good for a movie like this. The character is written as a two dimensional jerk but played by Hiddleston as a three dimensional guy with feelings and doubts. When Loki goes genocidal during the third act it feels sudden and undeveloped, like the movie ran out of time to fully flesh out his plan and persona and needed to get our asses out the door to make room for the 5:45 show(I took in a matinee).

They sure hid Kat Dennings under a lot of layers.

S.H.I.E.L.D. agents are instructed to have wrestling matches with all intruders on government property, instead of shooting them.

What is Asgard’s economy based on? Gold? Space gold?

Every room in Asgard has a tremendous amount of open space. Good for camera placement.

2 Responses to “Thor”

Thor and X-Men First Class are basically the same. Both mediocre films from which I had opposite expectations entering. For that reason alone Thor > First Class. I certainly hope Captain America can close.